The Narthex

As befits an octogenarian, I’ve been known to say, “Back in the day…,” but now and again a wise guy asks, “Just when was that?” So, to be more precise, I’ll refer to “the halcyon days of yore.” Nowadays, sadly, it has fallen on me to come to the defense…

Of late, there is an epidemic of excitement. Commerce crackles with it. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry is, respectively, so excited to be the new realtor in the neighborhood, the new car dealer in town, or the new sales chief for Gizmo, Inc. But wait! Every Tess, Kate, and Sally…

If the celebrated humanist Erasmus could pen the remarkable In Praise of Folly (1511), dedicating it to Thomas More, perhaps at this late date I can post a plug for the footnote. Think of adoxographia.[1] For a start, without the footnote, the heft of law journals would be…

“Been waiting for the bus?” I ask. “Too long,” answers Mrs. Kowalski, one of the regulars. “Late again, is it? Guess I’ll try for the afternoon run.” “Smart,” she answers, “but I’ve been sitting here too long to leave now.” Is she, gentle reader, throwing good money after bad? Sometimes…

“Ivan Ilych has died,” an acquaintance reads from the announcement of a formal obituary. Having followed earlier reports of Ivan’s mysterious illness, his colleagues in the judiciary are not surprised. In his classic story “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” Tolstoy recounts how they mourn in keeping with the hardness of…

Is ours the best of all possible worlds? The philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) thought so, and it’s a positive thought, isn’t it? But how could we know whether his claim is true? Can we even specify what would make it so? (Politicians, to be sure, often boast…

It began for us in a garden, the Garden of Eden. But it was there, through our first parents, that we fell. Try as we might, we cannot go back to that idyll. Still, when the news turns to noise, when the pundits become ponderous, I head for my wife’s…

“Sharper than any two-edged sword” is how St. Paul characterizes God’s Word (Hebrews 4:12). If we are to show Scripture the reverence it is due, we must read it with sober care. In addressing the question of the authority of the State, Paul gives us a text that demands our…

There’s no shortage of true crime, and there hasn’t been since Cain murdered Abel. Fast forward and, turning from fratricide to parricide, we have the murders of Rob and Michelle Reiner, allegedly at the hands of their son. Nor is there any shortfall of state violence. The protests in response…

Here in California there’s a debate about licensing cosmetologists. For my part, I wish there weren’t any to license. Plato would understand. In his Gorgias he compared politicians with cosmeticians. Both are busy about disguising reality. Cosmologists are another matter altogether. They’re the folks keen to answer the big questions…

"What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun." So Ecclesiastes tells us. There’s a truth here, and the lament finds an echo in the voices of those who discover how deeply weary this world…

What’s happened to the cheap, sensational booklets called “penny dreadfuls,” and to detective fiction? Penny dreadfuls, for a start, have evolved, big time. How so? G. K. Chesterton, we recall, champions them. His “In Defence of Penny Dreadfuls” (1901) calls them “The center of a million flaming imaginations.” He presents…

“Pleasure is what makes us human,” or so a bold new TV advert tells us. Well, then, AI doesn’t make the cut. Isn’t Fido, though, still a candidate? Not so. While the dog may be man’s best friend, anyone whose best friend is a dog needs help, and from a…

Pope Leo has made it official: St. John Henry Newman is a Doctor of the Church. In this I rejoice; Newman has long been a favorite of mine. I often taught his An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870), a classic in the epistemology of religion, in…

A few weeks ago, the Missionary of Charity Brothers celebrated the 50th Anniversary of their presence in Los Angeles. First, a bit of history. With the blessing of their foundress Mother Teresa, in 1966 Br. Andrew (originally a Jesuit priest) began his service as co-founder of the Congregation, centered in…